A space to learn how to enjoy your own company and make life less scary and more exciting.
🌻 9 Books You Can Read in a Day
|
Wisdom, distilled. The Internet loves to write think pieces about how we’ve lost our attention spans. Where did they go? Social media is one obvious culprit. I personally like to pick on TikTok for reasons such as : 5 TikTok Challenges That Left Thousands Injured and Over 100 Dead. In general, I’m pretty anti short-form video and the fact that information is becoming more and more condensed into visually-stimulating, “aesthetically-pleasing” 30-second sound bytes. Give me words. Give me chapters. Give me delicious sentences to underline and real paper pages to dog-ear. And give it to me even when I’m short on time. Because, yes, me too, I sometimes feel like life is a vat of quicksand mercilessly pulling me in. It’s part of why I’m trying to live a more analog life—one where I spend time away from social media and make my downtime less consumption-based and more pleasure-based. Naturally, books are a big part of that. Even when I feel like I have no time. If you’re short on time this week but still want to enrich your precious downtime instead of losing it to a doomscrolling spiral, try this: 9 good books you can read in a day. Start with one, and then let the good vibes roll. THE SHORTLIST: 9 short books to read in a day2 Classic books to read in a day… One from a French author and one from a Polish author 2 Fiction books to read in one day… One inspired by family and one romance novel 2 Non-fiction books you can read in one sitting… One book about health and one about philosophy 3 Memoirs under 200 pages… One from an Old Hollywood starlet; one from a NYT bestseller; and one from a poet Or if reading by mood is more your thing...
MORE ARTICLES ON BOOKS
Happy reading, Merry NOW GO ON YOUR MERRY WAY...👋 Questions? Comments? Salutations? I love to hear from you. Just hit REPLY and send me a note. 💌 Like these emails? Perhaps a friend would, too. Please FORWARD them this email. 🔔 Did someone forward you this email? Welcome to A Merry Loner, the blog that helps you learn to enjoy your own company. Sign up here to join the mailing list. |
Merry of "A Merry Loner"
A space to learn how to enjoy your own company and make life less scary and more exciting.
Stories to push you forward. For those born with an innate sense of wanderlust, it can be difficult to imagine there are others who don’t share the same yearning to move. But for some, traveling isn’t a series of glittering memories. When prompted to pack a suitcase and brave the rails, road, or sky, be it across the world or a stone’s throw away, they see not picturesque walks along riverbanks, new aromas wafting their way, or foreign tongues catching their ears. They see long queues,...
Shifting just a few purchases to locally owned stores makes a difference as we fight the good fight against mass production and megacorporations. In the last quarter of 2025, in a turn of events that stunned no one, OpenAI announced its move towards agentic commerce, allowing U.S. ChatGPT users to buy items directly in the chatbox. As an aside, let’s not forget that ChatGPT’s self-proclaimed mission is “to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.” How encouraging...
One Christmas alone doesn’t mean all Christmases will be alone. This year may be a quiet moment—that’s okay. Spending Christmas alone is a lot more common than people realize. A Mission for Michael (AMFM) conducted a survey in December 2025, combining the results with US census data to estimate how many people will spend Christmas alone this year: 16.3 million. But spending the holidays alone isn’t just an American phenomenon. A study by the Policy Institute at King’s College London found...